General Yang changed subjects as he poured Su yet another glass of whiskey. “When we last spoke, you said you were going to look into the possibility that we have a mole or leak somewhere in the command staff or army that was providing the Allies with highly sensitive data. What has your investigation turned up?”
Colonel Su paused and took several sips from his glass before he finally answered. “There may be some traitors in our midst; I’m confident we’ll probably find a few as we continue to examine the electronic data of the PLA general staff. What we have already found is a possible problem in the Y’an communication drones.”
Yang suddenly felt a feeling of panic. “Have the Allies found a way into our communications system?” he wondered.
He signaled for Su to continue and did his best to hide any emotions.
“I had the engineers reverse-engineer the components of the drone — tear the entire thing apart and examine it for malware or malicious code in the components and the operating system. The OS appears to be fine. None of my coders found a problem or anything out of the ordinary. However, when we scrutinized one of the microprocessors that’s responsible for the G5 capability, we came across something unusual—”
General Yang interrupted, “—Is it compromised?”
“We aren’t sure. It might be,” Su replied.
General Yang tried to remain calm, though he had this growing sense of dread at the possibility that the Allies could even now be listening into the daily communications of the PLA.
“Explain what you mean by ‘might be,’” he demanded.
“Prior to the war, we’d purchased this component in large quantities from an American telecom company we had a joint venture with. One of the other intelligence directorates had already stolen many of the chip designs prior to the beginning of the conflict, as we knew this was going to be a critical component in our unmanned aerial vehicle programs. When we went back and dug deeper into the employees at the facility, we discovered one particular engineer who had worked at the American plant for nearly a decade prior to being transferred back to our facility several months before the war started.”
Colonel Su continued, “At first, we didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, until we discovered the engineer was a bit of a fitness enthusiast. We then learned that he regularly used a Fitbit device. In short order, we were able to hack into the Fitbit application he used on his Apple smartphone, and through our access in the Apple cloud, we were able to track down his geolocations during his time in America. It took many days of digging, but we identified at least five times that he met with at least one person who has a direct connection to the American National Security Agency.”
Yang held up a hand before Su could go any further. “How could you possibly know he had met with someone from the NSA just by hacking into his Fitbit?”
Su grunted and a devilish smile spread across his face. “We’ve been using Fitbit data to track every known American government and military member possible for years. It’s rather complicated for me to explain. Suffice it to say, if you’re a military member or have a US government security clearance and you use a Fitbit, then chances are, we’ve been geotracking you for years, and all that data gets timestamped for later use. In this engineer’s case, we took his geolocations and overlaid them with known government or military members who have security clearances. Once we made a few matches, then we did a workup on who they were and if they posed a potential problem. In this case, several of them created cause for concern.”
Shaking his head in disbelief, General Yang feared the worst. “Tell me what your directorate may have found,” he said, not sure he really wanted to hear the answer.
“We looked at the specific projects this engineer worked on and then tore those parts apart, looking for anything. Once we knew where to look, we found it — a simple code buried in the firmware of the processor.” He held up a hand to stop Yang from asking another question before he was finished. “We’re currently examining exactly what the code does. As of right now, all we know is that it’s there and it doesn’t belong there. I spoke with several of my people before coming here, and they assure me that we’ll know soon enough. Once we do, I’ll make sure to relay that information to you.”
Leaning forward in his chair, Yang fixed Su in a deadly stare. “When you find out what this code does, I want you to come and brief me in person. You’re not to talk to anyone else about this but me. If what you’re saying is true, then we need to figure out how we can replace this component without the Allies finding out what we’re doing or that we have identified their spy. This has to be kept secret. Do you understand?”
Su nodded and assured him he would make sure the circle of people who knew this information stayed small. The two talked for a few more minutes before Yang dismissed him.
After spending a full hour with the man, General Yang judged that Colonel Su was a straight shooter — someone who would tell him what he needed to know, not just what he wanted to hear. He held off on telling Su anything further just yet. Right now, he needed the man focused on figuring out what the Allies had done to their communications drones.
The morning sun finally broke through the clouds and smog, revealing the layers of earthen trenches the tens of thousands of civilians and military engineers had been constructing around the city of Tangshan, fifty-six kilometers east of Beijing. The combined Allied army was now less than ninety kilometers from this very position, and God only knew when they would begin their final assault on the capital.
A colonel from the 5th Engineering Regiment guided General Yang and a couple of his advisors toward a series of large machine-gun bunkers and other large-scale structures they had been constructing.
Several cement trucks had pulled up to the wooden frames some of the workers were crowding around. A minute went by as the workers guided the troughs that would allow the cement to pour into the wall molds of the structure. Once the mixture started to flow, other workers began to inset strips of rebar between the mold of the walls to give the cement more strength once it had settled.
Yang stood there quietly for a few minutes, just watching the process, mesmerized by how quickly the engineers and civilian militia units were turning the area into a fortress. For nearly ten kilometers up and down the line, work crews were busy building similar structures in preparation for the Allied advance.
“Once the cement has settled in a couple of days, we’ll remove the wooden molds and then begin to cover the structures with several feet of sand and dirt to give them further protection,” the engineer explained. “In time, as grass and other undergrowth returns, it’ll add to the camouflage of the structure.”
“How many machine guns and soldiers can this particular structure hold?” one of Yang’s staff members asked.
“This is the largest type of structure that’ll be built on the defensive line. It’s essentially an anchor point. We’ve placed a structure like this every three kilometers, so they can provide each other with interlocking fields of fire supported by a series of four small machine-gun bunkers on each side. In this structure, there will be three light machines guns supported by two heavy machine guns. In addition to that, it’ll have two antitank guns and one 152mm Howitzer at the center of the structure. We’ve even gone so far as to design five different firing positions on the side of the bunker, where soldiers can quickly exit the structure to fire off an antitank missile and then quickly duck back inside for cover and grab another missile. Of course, those same soldiers can also swap out the antitank missiles for MANPADs as well.